Religious Actors and International Law

On the surface, Ioana Cismas's Religious Actors and International Law adopts an analytical approach familiar to the field: the emphasis on specific clauses within legal instruments and in-depth analysis of cases, preoccupation with the post–Cold War era, selective engagement with scholarly materials to emphasize academic or policy stances, and a conventional set of actors, with individual chapters dedicated to religious church organizations in the European context, the Holy See-Vatican in respect to international law, and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) in relation to human rights law. These studies are organized around a central claim: religious actors are an independent category of subjects created by and existing within international law, and because their status is grounded in international law, religious actors must adhere to international legal norms without recourse to claiming exclusive or special rights, especially as it relates to human rights. This claim is itself grounded in a historical-theoretical understanding introduced early on to the reader that views international law, and especially human rights, evolving partly out of religious sources but being grounded today in the hard lessons of political history and universally shared principles, whereby religion draws primarily “on traditional and charismatic sources,” whereas human rights are essentially comprised of “rational-legal features” (p. 57). The lesson here is that the inherent universal rationality of human rights norms provide relative certainty to legal interpretation, whereas the charismatic nature of religion suggests that its characteristics are largely malleable, particularistic, and thereby open to diverse interpretations. Because religious autonomy is hence solely grounded in a respect for individual subjectivity, Cismas argues that scholars can circumvent questions concerning the extent liberal modes of international law are compatible with particular religious beliefs or practices and instead focus exclusively on the question of how religious actors can most comprehensively support human rights norms as they are interpreted by leading international courts, organizations, and scholars.

Autonomy · Context (archaeology) · Epistemology · Human rights · International human rights law · International law · Interpretation (philosophy) · Political science · Politics · Rationality · Sociology · American Constitutional Law and Politics · International Law and Human Rights · Law · Philosophy · Religious Freedom and Discrimination